Cook Plays Racism Card

What is the most effective way of making race a political issue?

In the United Kingdom, the Commission for Racial Equality has provided a simple answer in the lead up to next month's general election -- a demand that politicians sign a pledge promising not to exploit racial matters.  This has stirred up a hornet's nest of charge and counter-charge as political parties scramble for the moral high ground.

The pledge has also been a great trap for the opposition Conservative Party.  This was probably its real purpose from the start.

Although the Commission for Racial Equality is supposedly independent, a majority of its executive members either belong to the governing Labour Party, or have close links with Labour-leaning bodies.  Dr Raj Chandran, a former commissioner of the CRE, has accused the organisation of acting in collusion with the government.  He also claims that the CRE has consistently refused to investigate serious allegations of racism against Labour.

The trap works in two ways.  Firstly, the names of politicians who refuse to sign are published, leading to demands that they be punished.  While some Labour backbenchers have acted honourably, criticising the pledge as irrelevant, most of the miscreants are Conservatives.

No doubt the British Labour Party contains its fair share of racists.  But as a result of the general confusion between race and culture that afflicts contemporary thinking, the greater willingness of Conservative politicians to celebrate and defend British traditions makes them more vulnerable to the "racist" smear.

This confusion is also the key to the second part of the trap.  A number of legitimate but controversial social questions have a cultural or ethnic aspect.  So opposition politicians who voice popular concerns about rising numbers of illegal immigrants, or preferential treatment for some ethnic groups, or certain other matters that are troublesome for Labour, can be attacked for "breaking the pledge", thus distracting attention from the issues themselves.

Unfortunately, events over the past few weeks confirm this cynical interpretation.  Even more unfortunately, they also show that sometimes the "racist" tag is justified.

Last month, in a speech to the Social Market Foundation, the British Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, said there was no such thing as a British race.  He pointed out that the racial composition of the British people has always been in flux, as individuals from many places have come to the British Isles over the centuries, contributing to the cultural and economic strength of the nation.  He added that "the modern notion of national identity cannot be based on race and ethnicity, but must be based on shared ideals and aspirations".

The sentiments and the history are sound.  Africans and other non-Europeans have lived in England and intermarried with the locals since Elizabethan times.  In 1788, for instance, at least a dozen blacks arrived in Australia on the First Fleet.

But Mr Cook wasn't just offering an innocent statement of historical facts and noble ideals.  Rather, despite having signed the CRE pledge on race, he was clearly attempting to heighten tensions in the Conservative Party over immigration and national identity.

The legitimate aspect of the foreign minister's message was further compromised by the dopey illustration he gave of Britain's ability to absorb and adapt external influences.  According to Mr Cook, chicken tikka masala had become the country's national dish, created by adding masala sauce to the dry Indian dish of chicken tikka, in order "to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy".

This means nothing, of course.  A lager lout could happily sit down to a curry or chicken tikka masala before venturing out to bash some "Pakis".

It would have made more sense to state that, provided they are welcomed and given appropriate incentives to integrate, non-European immigrants can frequently become stronger supporters of the "British way of life" than many locals.  The plight of countries they are leaving often helps them to appreciate the political and cultural strengths of liberal Western nations.

But even if Cook foolishly confounded culinary taste with racial tolerance, some Conservatives took the bait, causing just the row he was obviously hoping to trigger.  Yorkshire MP John Townend, one of the Conservatives who refused to sign the pledge, and whose previous comments on immigration had already caused problems for his party, suggested that Labour ministers wanted to transform the British into a "mongrel race".

Not surprisingly, these offensive and genuinely racist comments upset many people.  Lord Taylor of Warwick, who became the first black Tory peer in 1996, said that Mr Townend should be thrown out of the Conservative Party.

Conservative leader William Hague initially responded that as Townend was retiring at the forthcoming election, it would simply be "gesture politics" to expel him, as it would only make him a martyr.  Perhaps he knows enough about Australia to remember what happened to Pauline Hanson after she lost her Liberal Party endorsement in the 1996 elections under somewhat comparable circumstances.

But with the controversy dragging on, Hague forced Townend to sign a letter of apology last week, retracting his comments.  A few days later, the Yorkshire MP was reported to have withdrawn his retraction, claiming that he had only made it under pressure.

This unpleasant episode shows that sanctimonious politicians and activists are rarely willing to put racial harmony ahead of struggles for political advantage.  But people genuinely committed to a colour-blind society would never have allowed a counter-productive quango like the Commission for Racial Equality to exist in the first place.

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